I am curious if any of you know why some Muslim women wear full burkas where only their eyes show - it freaks me out to be honest. I have no problem with head coverings, with different styles of dress. We live in a very diverse area - Sikh Indians with turbans do not bother me in the least, nor do orthodox Jewish men with top hats or women with shaved heads and wigs and long skirts and etc etc, any other ethnicity. I guess only seeing slits for eyes makes me feel worried for them. Do any of you know the reason for this? Do any of you wear full burkas? Sorry if I am offending someone!
It is a religious thing. The women’s body is to be completely covered. The eye slits are so they can see. Their religion dictates they show modesty. Modesty is interpreted as covering everything.
To put my words to it. A woman’s body is considered a temptation. By covering it you are taking all temptation out.
Wikipedia has a good article on them
For women in this country, I would imagine that there are perhaps reasons such as religious observance as well as a group identity. It doesn’t bother me that people choose to observe their religion and its teachings in this way. I wouldn’t, but who am I to impose my values on the, when they are not imposing their values on me. (If I could impose my values on society, I’d see a lot less bra straps, butt cracks, and underwear.) As we live in a country which does not require certain attire (just that one IS attired), I believe that many of the women here in the US wear veils as either an observance of their personal faith or as a cultural collective identity.
Here’s an interesting link in regard to the conversation about veils:
It’s not just a ‘repressed woman’ issue, in any case. Many women are proud to show their faith in this way, just like many Christian women might wear a cross- it’s a quick cultural indicator of what one values and ‘who’ one is.
They claim it’s a religious thing but there’s nothing that explicitly says that they MUST cover every single inch of their bodies.
It’s carrying modesty to an illogical extreme.
If they want to of their own free will - I’m fine with it.
(For that matter if you want to walk around mostly naked I’m ok with it although I think it’s going the other way to the illogical extreme.)
If they are forced to else they’ll be stoned to death - that I’ve got a problem with.
In some cases religion shapes culture but more often it’s culture that shapes religion.
Personally (and this is my own little twisted view - I don’t expect anyone to agree with it) if being viewed by a male is a danger to his self control then he’s got no self control and he can wear a blindfold - it solves that problem without enslaving a whole gender.
If anyone’s offended by that - BUMMER!
I find the degree to which some cultures shut down and lock away women to be even more offensive.
One half of the human species does not exists merely as a system for penis stimulation.
I delete hate mail so don’t bother.
There are different levels of observance and different interpretations of the Quran, the Hadith, and Sharia Law, similar to the different interpretations of the Bible and the 10 Commandments. Some believe that Islam requires those standards of dress for women, as well as certain grooming standards for men. Others do not. No need to be freaked out by it–underneath they’re just like you. They normally wear normal clothes underneath it and when they are in the privacy of their own homes, with their immediate family, they don’t wear it.
Idk why when it comes to religion, it’s usually the woman who has to wear a certain type of attire and not the men. I’m a Christian and I’ve grown up in churches where certain attire was expected even though it wasn’t biblically supported. As a result, women were not allowed to wear pants, or shorts. They were expected to wear long skirts. I was once called a “Jazabel” because I wore make up. Some churches would frown on a woman wearing bare legs to church. None of these rules ever affect the men. SMH
Free will is a funny thing. When you’re raised to adhere to strict religious “rules” your ability to make decisions independent from those teachings is compromised.
Like the Duggar daughters, Hasidic Jews and FLDS, Fundamentalist Muslim women are expected to be subservient to men. In my opinion clothing restrictions are an outward sign that those women weren’t raised to exercise their own free will as adults. I’m sure in many cases there are women who really are making that choice on their own but you can’t separate the effect of upbringing on a person’s lifestyle. Especially when that lifestyle includes a certain amount of oppression.
It doesn’t freak me out to see women dressed like that. I do wonder about any religion that insists women dress a certain way. The God I pray to doesn’t care in the least what people are wearing. Much more important is what people are doing.
I’ve heard them talk on TV about this and the women said that they feel empowered by it because THEY get to decide who they show their body to.
Having grown up in America, I don’t get it. It seems like religious extremism which, as we’ve seen, can be dangerous.
I’m part of the baby boomer generation and I grew up when girls had to wear dresses to school and church. It’s almost comical now to think how stupid that was…but at the time, we all accepted. Thank heavens for the women’s movement. We all owe Gloria Steinham and others like her a BIG thank you!
Part of it goes back many centuries when women did not wear the full Burkas and were raped. The men or women decided to protect the beautiful and the not so beautiful from being raped by putting them all in this garb. I mean you can’t tell what that person really looks like until they take off the Burka in their home.
It is a carry over from their cultural and the country they are from. Like the habits the nuns used to wear that were black with the Red Cross shoes.
Just one way the world turns.
the other Suzanne
PS I asked someone once when we were stationed overseas about the Burka. It sure is hard to see out of it as I wore one once for a function.
it’s a religious thing, not to attract want from men other their own husbands. nothing freaky about it.
For modesty.
Lets not start a thread that insults someone else’s beliefs and try to disguise it as a “just wanted to know” question. Not cool.
Some people do things differently than you. No need to be freaked out about it.
Update: Leah…Yes, really. And I will feel free to answer any question on this forum anytime I feel the need. If you don’t like the answer, don’t ask the question.
I know there are Muslim women who choose the burqa, but there are plenty who are coerced. I have many Muslim friends, although none who veil themselves to that extreme. Other countries, like France, have recognized that these extreme coverings pose a potential security risk, but in this country, we get so hysterical about religious tolerance, there has been no ban on face covering.
The simplest and best Western religious analogy would be comparing the way Catholic nuns cover up in long, head to ankle habits to the Burka’s purpose. Same purpose, just that the Muslim women marry.
I have asked many women with burkas why they cover up in such varying degrees, the eye slit opening the most extreme. The pat answer from all Muslim women is that they are observing and respecting their religious tradition, because they personally choose to and want to symbolize their closeness to God / Allah.
With that said, what’s interesting to note is how fancy the coverings are say between the Saudi’s, the wealthiest of the bunch, to Pakistani / Afghan Muslim, usually the poorer of them.. The Saudi women go to great extreme to bejewel and bedeck their all black coverings with Swarovski crystals in lovely designs.
And underneath it all, it’s usually Western wear. Except for the Muslim Indian who wear sarees.
Also, the coverings start when the girl enters puberty and starts her first menses, in general.
because, as everyone knows, men have no self-control whatsoever, and the very sight of woman’s arm or calf will cause them to surrender to their baser natures, and rape and ravage will follow.
there are lots of gentler answers, such as ‘i choose to whom to reveal myself’, but that’s at the heart of it.
i know many woman ‘choose’ their prisons, but the number who do so without being raised within an oppressive culture and/or family is vanishingly small.
as a little girl growing up in the LDS church, i can remember how vehemently all the women i knew fought the equal rights amendment with eloquence, passion and energy.
when i see a burka, i can’t help thinking ‘republic of gilead.’
khairete
unapologetically feminist suz
I have friends over in Afghinstan and family who have served overseas…and my ENT doctor is Muslim…there is a lot of confusion in Western culture about the hijab and burqa…
In the Islamic culture - dress is about modesty. It also is a custom as well as social class…
The attire you are talking about - the burka or burqa - is the “Conservative” choice for some Muslim women. As her beauty should ONLY be seen by her husband. Hence the veil (hijab in Arabic).
The Hijab you see women in Western cultures is typical - the scarf over the head and neck and the most widely accepted form of modesty in the Islamic culture.
The scarf or Hijab around the neck and face is the “most popular” choice. However, some women do wear the chandor - which is the “cape” we see many times here in the US.
There is debate about whether or not the Hijab is required to be worn in the Quaran. However, the point is that the women, when seen in public, should be NON-Descript. The man who marries her is the one who should see her beauty. The burqa is NOT worn by females until they reach womanhood, most usually wear the scarves or Hijab but NOT the burqa. When they are in their private residence, they typically do NOT wear the attire.
Under Taliban rule - women are NOT allowed to study or work. If they didn’t wear the burqa, they were considered unfit for marriage.
Hope this helps!
I do understand you aren’t trying to put down a group of people with your question. I teach cultural anthropology at a college, so the issue of how to make sense of different cultural customs is pretty familiar to me, and veiling is one topic which we discuss in my class. So, this post may be a bit long…
For background, European/Western society has been fascinated (obsessed) with Muslim women’s veiling since the Middle Ages, and I think that might be why the full veil makes you feel uncomfortable in a way that you don’t with other religious outfits. We see it as a sign of oppression and also brings out the ‘what’s under there?’ curiosity. As a couple other posters said, however, if we actually LISTEN to what Muslim women say about veiling and why they do it, there are quite a few different answers. Some see it as showing their commitment to their religion, some see it just as the way not to draw attention to their appearance, some see it as ‘that’s what my parents told me to do and it’s what my sister does, so I do it,’ some see it as a way to participate in public life (attend university, work as a doctor, etc) without being hassled… the reasons vary alot.
There are lots of different styles of veiling, and every society has different norms for how much/what of the body should be covered. Every society has norms for both men AND women–appropriate dress for Saudi men involves covering their bodies fully too. An observant Muslim colleague of mine (US raised, by the way) always wears a plain loose gown-like outfit. He has a specific one which he wears to the graduation ceremonies, presumably his fancy dress. I have never seen him in pants or a suit; that clothing item is what he considers appropriate attire based on his religious faith. To be clear, I do think that laws forcing one group to follow another group’s ideas of proper dress are a problem (the Afghan Taliban had laws for both men and women’s appearance which were harshly enforced and were imposed on groups who hadn’t had those rules before). Every group, however, has norms for dress, and the question is how much agreement exists about what is ‘appropriate.’
Another example of how the rules vary with a group is that there is a people in Western Africa (a large group called Fulani, spread out through several countries) where the men wear veils. They tend to raise them and cover their faces when negotiating business deals or other transactions with other men. Oh, and a society’s norms change over time. We have had changes in our ideas of ‘proper’ dress–think about what bathing suits for men and women looked like in the 1920s US versus what they looked like in the 1970s. Someone else mentioned about the nun’s habit; that is a great comparison. So think of a burqa as one group’s idea of appropriate female dress at this point in history.
My main point is that I really don’t think that the veil/ burqa, when worn by choice, is about oppressing women or protecting them from rape. It is about showing one’s membership in a particular group. To understand why a particular person/group has a certain style of dress, you have to ask them and listen carefully to what they say.
Why does this particular variation in dress bother you so much?
There are tremendous variations in dress within many “umbrella” designations for religions. For example, there are Catholic nuns who wear full black habits, others who just wear a head covering and “street clothes”, and many who wear white habits of varying skirt lengths. It varies based on the order to which they belong, like a uniform. For that matter, there are priests who wear robes, cassocks, or a dark jacket and a clerical collar. There are Protestant ministers (men and women) who wear clerical collars, and others who wear street clothes.
There are variations with Amish culture: some wear clothes with buttons, others do not. The Mennonites wear a little more variety in patterns (florals, for example, vs. solid colors) and will wear a sneaker with a logo on it sometimes. But there are variations within the Amish themselves and within the Mennonites themselves.
Within Islam, there are women who wear the burqa, while others wear the abaya, and still others the hijab. Others wear “Western” clothing.
There is variation among Orthodox Jewish women as well -some wear wigs (called sheitels) or scarves that cover most everything, while others just wear a hat and show plenty of their own hair. Others don’t wear head coverings at all, but dress “modestly” - which can mean ankle- or calf-length skirts, or knee-length skirts with tights.
Are some of these women submissive, abused, and constrained by their society? Yes, in some cases; no, in others. One could argue the other way - that American dress that over-sexualizes women, is just as much an imprisonment and a symbol of male control as the burqa. I’m not defending this statement, but really, how often have you heard people say about a woman in revealing clothing “She was raped? Well, she was asking for it” or “Does she need to dress like a hooker?” I guarantee you, no woman in a burqa has ever had that said about her, and she’s never received snarky remarks from men on the street. I’m not defending the burqa, I’m just stay that, for some women, it MAY be freeing. SO the imprisonment we see or feel is largely based on our orientation. Things you and I accept as common are horrifying to others. (Women in the US STILL make 79 cents for every dollar that men make. Language experts have long noted that even our insults to men actually insult their mothers, such as “bastard” and “son of a bitch.” So while we don’t force women to wear burqas many parts of the US and elsewhere, that doesn’t mean we’re free of stereotypes and oppression. There’s plenty of discussion going on about whether emaciated fashion models, the cosmetics industry, the plastic surgery industry, and things like “twerking” represent emancipation for women!
There is an issue in some countries with identification, and (for example) in France where there was a big flare-up over women in burqas having limited peripheral vision and therefore driving. (And yes, while women cannot drive in many countries, in France, there is a large Muslim population and some individual expressions of liberty that included driving in various styles of headwear. However, there is tremendous religious discrimination in France against Muslims as well as Jews, which is a whole other issue!)
I think we all have to examine our expectations, cultural orientations, and even prejudices when discussing these issues.
I don’t understand why it bothers you. I once saw a cartoon that had a western woman, scantily clad passing a fully hidden woman in a burka, as you describe. The thought bubble over each of their heads was the same - “I feel so sorry for the way the men in that society make that woman dress.” If you are raised with beliefs about the roll of sex and women and men and sexuality, you dress according to the customs of that society and beliefs. I can easily understand why it would be far more comfortable to be covered head to toe when venturing out. The women I know who wear burkas do it because they WANT to.
my neighbor’s mother-in-law makes $66/hr on the computer. She has been out of work for 7 months but last month her paycheck was $19019 just working on the computer for a few hours. look at here…
There are some really thoughtful and helpful responses here so I am going to applaud you for educating yourself. This was a brave question.
Please don’t be offended, but I am going to mention your question the next time that I have to explain to a parent why we teach the basic facts of major world religions as part of our middle school social studies curriculum. We live in an increasingly diverse nation and interconnected world so there are some basic things that we should learn about each other’s beliefs and customs. I hope that my students go home and share what they have learned with their families, including the parents --who likely grew up in a less diverse society and may be curious but uncomfortable asking.
It is rare that I find middle school students shy about asking. When that occurs, they have usually been taught that it is somehow rude or racist to notice differences. I try to teach them sensitive but accurate terms to use and to thank the person for giving them helpful information. (The only person I’ve met who was completely ridiculous about this approach is the mom of one of my younger daughter’s acquaintances. When her child told my child that we were not Christians, I replied that Catholics ARE Christians. The mother got angry and told me to stay out of what she taught her child!)